Forget soap nails and French tips, today’s nail art is all about pushing boundaries. Think: miniature Fiji water bottles with real liquid inside, photo-realistic 3D spiders, or even a birthday cake candle burning right on your fingertip. These out-of-the-box sculptural ideas are what some of the world’s most creative salon technicians are applying to nails.
It’s an exciting time for hand-based art – just look at new innovations including wearable nail tech in the form of a tattoo machine, or a microphone for picking up nearby goss. Biodegradable, press-on sets made from shellfish and animal products are also making their debut. OK, so these might not be the kind of thing you can request in your local salon, but they reflect a broader shift. Once an area of the body to simply make neat and presentable, nails have become a focal point of our image and self-expression.
Nail culture is at the centre of a new image-laden book, out today, by Tembe Denton-Hurst, Fresh Sets: Contemporary Nail Art from Around the World. Denton-Hurst, who is a journalist at New York Magazine and the author of Homebodies, first got into nails through her mum, fixated by the shiny acrylics she one day came home with. Ever since getting her own set, she’s rarely missed an appointment.
In the book she profiles some of the most innovative artists right now – several of which are Dazed Beauty favourites, including Tomoya Nakagawa, Alona Sobolevska, and Marggie Nails – from cities including Seoul, Punjab, Moscow and Berlin. “It’s not just, can you draw an interesting line, or a cool squiggle,” she says. “People are creating entire scenescapes on a nail – it’s really become very advanced. This book ten years ago would have looked very different.” Below we spoke to Denton-Hurst about all things nail.
Did working on the book open your eyes to anything about the nail industry?
Tembe Denton-Hurst: It was interesting to learn about the history of the manicure, and then the democratisation of it. How the refugee camps of Vietnamese Americans then resulted in this burst of entrepreneurship and the cropping up of Vietnamese salons, starting in California, and how that lowered the price of nails, making it more accessible for everyone.
Prior to that, long nails were a status symbol, because it was something that only wealthy women could afford to do with any regularity. I love that the beauty industry has come from such diverse experiences. Hip-hop and culture has a contribution to pushing the conversation forward, with people like Flo-Jo, the track star, who was known for running with those crazy amazing nails.
I love the hyper-personalised element of nails – one example being Lesly Arrañaga who recreated her childhood birthday cakes on a set.
Tembe Denton-Hurst: I think nails are going to be a bit like tattoos, in a way, where trends will persist, but then some people want really, really bespoke stuff. For my wedding nails, for example, I got my partner’s initials on one pinky nail, and then I got the date of our wedding on another, and she did the first letter of my name on her nail. I think nails saying something about you is becoming more popular – people want to walk around with their personality readily available.
Some technicians are experimenting with ‘dirty-core’: these gross, disgusting styles – Marggie Nails, for example. What do you make of these shifting ideals of beauty?
Tembe Denton-Hurst: People are interested in doing something fresh – with Marggie and that anti-manicure look, the typical point is to beautify the nails, and then it’s like, ‘OK, so we can do the opposite, like, make it look worse than it is’. Make it look bruised, make it look broken. The optical illusion of it all is really interesting. It’s all about creating tension aesthetically.
In her profile, Oksana Zavora [Chummy Nails] mentions the hand close-ups in Wong Kar-wai’s In The Mood For Love. It made me think about AI-generated images and how hands are the thing AI often gets wrong, because of their expressiveness. Maybe that’s part of why our nails are so important.
Tembe Denton-Hurst: Hands say so much about a person – how they live their lives, the work they do, how they care for themselves, how they care for other people. Beautifying the hands is a really long tradition, and I really love that point about AI, because some corners of the world will push the idea that AI is a worthwhile replacement for creative work and human contribution. The fact that hands are hard to replicate is special because it speaks to the spaces where this organic human-to-human connection is not only needed, but cannot be duplicated by a non-human thing.
Nail art has been shifting into the male space in recent years, too.
Tembe Denton-Hurst: Absolutely – we’re seeing it become more gender neutral or gender expansive, and people becoming able to participate in it without necessarily communicating anything about anyone’s sexual orientation. People like A$AP Rocky or Tyler, the Creator are doing a lot of nail stuff. They’re not necessarily on the extension wave just yet, though. A friend of mine’s son wanted to paint his nails after looking at the book, and that’s really cool because nail art is for everybody – anyone can participate. I’m sure there’s still a lot of stigma, especially around added length. But people are at least starting to experiment with colours and design.
Where do you see nail art going in the future?
Tembe Denton-Hurst: I think we’re going to see more art and life being transferred to the nail. Whether that’s people being like, ‘I love this colour scheme from this painting.’ I also think we’re gonna see less direct interpretations of things, like cobwebs for Halloween or hearts for Valentine’s Day. It’ll be more abstract – like you might do the texture of a leaf under a microscope for autumn, or the feel of grape or banana skin for summer. An abstracted version between the moment and how that shows up in design.
Fresh Sets: Contemporary Nail Art from Around the World is out now.
